La Irrelevancia Militar de la OTAN.

 

Global Insights: NATO Risks 'Collective Military Irrelevance'

By Richard Weitz | 14 Jun 2011

Logo de la NATO.

On June 10, Robert Gates ended his last major policy speech in Europe as defense secretary with his most public rebuke ever regarding Europeans' failure to provide adequate defense resources to the trans-Atlantic alliance. Gates complained that NATO had finally become what he had long feared: a "two-tiered alliance" divided between those few allies that engage in "hard" combat missions on one hand, and the overwhelming majority of members that can only contribute extensively to "soft" noncombat operations like humanitarian, peacekeeping and training missions on the other. Gates correctly noted that proposed NATO-wide reforms and efficiency measures would at best have a limited impact unless the allies spend more on defense.


Before an audience at the influential Security and Defense Agenda in Brussels, Gates stressed the injustice and political impossibility of perpetuating a situation in which some NATO members are "apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets."




Azul: Estados miembros, Marrón: Diálogo Mediterraneo;
Verde claro: Asociación por la Paz y Verde oscuro: Paises de contacto

According to Gates, whereas during the Cold War, the United States and the other NATO members spent roughly equal sums on defense, the United States now accounts for 75 percent of all NATO defense spending, at a time when the massive $1.4 trillion U.S. budget deficit could soon force reductions in U.S. defense allocations.

Gates cited severe capability shortfalls with the NATO missions in Afghanistan and Libya to illustrate how slumping European defense budgets were depriving European militaries of essential capabilities. He lamented that, despite having more than 2 million military personnel and spending an aggregate $300 billion on defense, the non-U.S. allies struggled to maintain 25,000 to 45,000 soldiers in the field in Afghanistan. Furthermore, European militaries have consistently proved unable to provide adequate helicopters, transport aircraft and support assets to the alliance's mission there.

As a result of the Obama administration's surge of forces into the Afghanistan conflict, what had been a genuine coalition effort, in which approximately equal number of American and European troops had been engaged, has become "Obama's War," in which some two-thirds of the foreign soldiers fighting against the Taliban are American.

The problem is that most European militaries still spend excessively on capabilities related to territorial defense, rather than on those designed to meeting global challenges through expeditionary forces. Of the 2 million European active duty forces, only 3-5 percent of them are readily deployable and sustainable at strategic distances from Europe in complex contingencies, such as stabilization, counterpiracy and peacekeeping missions.

Gates did praise the allies for sustaining the Afghanistan mission for so long. NATO forces have been there for almost a decade and have gradually overcome integration problems as well as the insistence of many governments on limiting how their forces are employed through "national caveats." But he warned against any "rush to the exits" now that victory was in sight, arguing that the only way to induce the Taliban to negotiate seriously about reconciliation was to convince them that they cannot win on the battlefield.

Gates was even more critical of the NATO effort in Libya, which preoccupied the previous two days of meetings among NATO defense ministers. He lamented that, while all the NATO members had voted in favor of that Operation Unified Protector, less than half of them have participated in combat missions, and even fewer were engaged in strike operations.

In particular, Gates noted that the lack of European intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft and aerial refueling planes has required the United States to provide the largest share of these planes despite the disengagement its own strike aircraft from that mission. He added that "the mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country, yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, again requiring the United States to make up the shortfall."

The irony is that, according to Gates, if ever there were a NATO operation that should be European-led, this is it. Operation Unified Protector enjoys widespread political support, does not involve NATO ground forces on Libyan territory and is occurring in Europe's neighborhood. Yet, while singling out Belgium, Canada, Denmark and Norway for punching above their weight in making major contributions to the air strikes, Gates bewailed the fact that they represented the exceptions in an otherwise gloomy picture. According to Gates, "many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they can't. The military capabilities simply aren't there."

Although in his speech Gates focused on the current NATO missions in Afghanistan and Libya, the capabilities shortfalls concern a range of alliance issues. The deep defense budget cuts recently adopted by many NATO members came on top of years of insufficient military spending. Combined, the two trends call into question whether NATO can maintain and develop the expanding defense capabilities called for by the 2010 Strategic Concept, which lists a growing range of security challenges requiring an allied response. The November 2010 Summit in Lisbon that adopted the Strategic Concept document also approved a so-called Lisbon package of priority capability needs. These 10 critical capabilities -- ranging from missile and cyber defenses to improved protection against improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan -- aim to bolster the alliance's ability to address global threats.

Although Gates warned that there "is the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal future for the trans-Atlantic alliance," he went on to state that "such a future is . . . not inevitable." He called on NATO governments to adopt new procurement, logistics and other initiatives to enhance their dwindling combat capabilities and ensure that the collective capabilities provided to NATO more closely match the sum of its individual members' contributions.

NATO leaders have cited cost pressures from budget cuts as providing an opportunity as well as an imperative to secure more military value for defense spending. This can be accomplished through such measures as reducing unwanted defense duplication; reallocating resources based on collective rather than national priorities; encouraging more national military specialization on niche capabilities; and pursuing more collaborative research, development and procurement based on common funding mechanisms.

Pessimists point to enduring obstacles to enhanced coherence among European defense industries. Industrial policy concerns such as sustaining domestic employment as well as an understandable reluctance to rely on other countries for important military capabilities typically exert much more influence on national spending than do collective security considerations.

For this reason, proposals to extend NATO-wide defense procurement have never made much progress. NATO defense investment continues to be diluted across an excessive number of projects, with the most important military powers seeking to sustain national aviation, shipbuilding and information technology sectors despite the resulting duplication, inefficiencies and insufficient economies of scale.

In any case, Gates noted that various multilateral defense coordination initiatives could at best make only a minimal contribution, since "ultimately, nations must be responsible for their fair share of the common defense."

Unfortunately, Gates acknowledged that major progress in this area was unlikely. Perhaps the main reason for this enduring problem was what Gates had termed in February 2010 "the demilitarization of Europe." It is extremely difficult to mobilize support among European publics for military interventions, even when European governments are willing to go to war. As a result, allied governments have little incentive to prepare for war by enhancing military capabilities.

Richard Weitz is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor. His weekly WPR column, Global Insights, appears every Tuesday